Seasonality & the Archaeology of a Year

3 April 2016

Flu lays low the housemate. It’s too cold and depressing to accompany friends to Funderworld on Durdham Downs in Bristol, despite the promise of candyfloss and vintage rave tracks. I stick with plan A and take myself off for a Sunday adventure. Wandering amongst the vitrines and drawers at the Pitt Rivers Museum I think of holes punched in things and things stitched together (leather, skin, hearts, paper, celluloid, lips) and of magic and trials by ordeal, knuckle dusters and shoemakers thumb.

Driving back to Bristol, I think about colleagues’ research that helps me to think about the liveliness of things. And so I’m drawn as much to the typeface on the printed card beside the aquarium-bound salmon as I am to its previous life swimming free amongst the Haida. That salmon makes me stop the car to photograph wind turbines in agricultural land and business parks topped by new housing estates and the resilient traces of the CND on a ruined bus stop that doesn’t know it’s ruined as it continues to shelter passengers from the rain.